The city administrator position opening closed March 25. The Colorado Work Force Center screened all the resumes using the guidelines we established, which resulted in 15 qualified applicants for the second level of screening. One applicant has since withdrawn from the position, so we have 14 applicants. These applicants have been directed to respond to a series of questions that we created based on various sources.

We have compiled the Resume and Question Committee. This committee is comprised of Mayor Troutman, Councilor Kathy Schmucker, community members Al Ballard, Jerry Meloni, Patti Schwabe, Krysten Econome and City Finance Director Harry Patel, We asked Harry to help us review the resumes because of his financial background and the importance of these skills to the position. Mike Neslanik has been working with this group to educate them on the processes that will be used to score and evaluate the resumes and the responses to the questions. This committee will meet today and complete this critical, challenging task. On Monday, council will take this information for all the applicants and select our finalists.

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As I mentioned before, Mike will then run a background check on all of the finalists. We plan to have a quick public introduction of the finalists at 3:30 p.m. April 25 in Council Chambers. This is intended to give each applicant an opportunity to introduce themselves to Cañon City. That will be followed with a very short public meet-and-greet session with the finalists. We have nearly completed the making up of the Interview Committee. The Interview Committee is another community based group that will conduct personal interviews with the finalists April 26. Council also will conduct their personal interviews with the finalists on April 26th. Finalists will be participating in two different interview processes on that day. It will be a very busy day for everyone, especially the finalists.

We originally intended to do some sort of departmental onsite visits. While we have not finalized this plan, we are working on a process that will allow our department managers an opportunity to get to know the finalists, and then pass their opinions on to council. We believe city staff should be afforded the opportunity to participant in the process. We are still looking at a practical way to achieve the department site visits. More information will follow on this.

When all is done, council will take the input from department managers, community group interviews, and council interviews, and select a potential new city administrator. We will then move to the negotiation stage and hopefully announce our selection and their acceptance May 2.

In closing, I want to thank Mike Neslanik for his efforts in this process. There is no way that council would have been able to get this task accomplished without the help from someone of Mike's skills, abilities, and capabilities. Mike has been the perfect selection for facilitating this process.

Jim Meisner is an elected member of Cañon City Council, At Large and appointed member of the Negotiations Committee for the City of Cañon City.

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